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The new old minimalists

The earliest websites were minimal in the extreme, but without the style and flair to make a virtue of their simplicity. 37signals and Kottke pioneered the combination of simplicity with deft design sense. Cardigan made it art.

Although it is never popular, never the dominant trend, rarely wins design awards, and almost never earns acclaim from designers, design stripped down to its essentials is always a good idea, and especially on the web, where every byte counts. We salute the old and new practitioners of minimalist web design, and solicit your thoughts on pioneers or present practitioners who combine a minimalist aesthetic with significant design chops.

I can’t dig up any classic sites, but I do have a kick ass LAUNCH magazine CD-ROM that rocked my world in 1999 (the amount of flashy design was amazing at the time, but not yet practical for a web page).

As well as the Neutica theme, I love the subtraction.com website you listed, especially with the B&W images. For some reason minimalism seems to have fallen out of use a bit recently. I do hope it’s on it’s way back.
Also thanks for the Hat tip.

The first 37signals site was so influential in my web design upbringing. The tone of the text, the elegance of simplicity in their writing mirrors the design. It’s beautiful, simple and effective. I read every page on the site dozens of times over.

the minimal style will kick all of this web 2.0 glossy style that become a trend.
Me being a new in the business was taught web design and photoshop and all we learn was to design web 2.0 looking websites because was the hottest thing in the market.
My philosophy as a designer without much experience is: get your own ideas on the table and go for it.

We redesigned and rebuilt Polychrome.com last year to try to tackle a few points: Can a pure HTML/CSS site look great enough for a design company? Can a design firms site actually look good on an iPhone (means no Flash)? Can we take advantage of special Safari rendering tricks to make the type look even better than in FF? All in all, was well worth it.

Sorry for going OT, but this blog has been keeping an eye on the progress of web-fonts for some time.
It looks like the first web fonts service ready for prime time has appeared.
Check it out:A Web Font Service For Real, A Sneak Peak At Kernest
Sorry for the interruption.

still searching for those yellow stickers i used to hand out to interns at jazzradio in the early day; stemmed from the Czech, but had links to hell.com and a bunch of others in those early hurly burly days. will report back. over.

Joe Clark’s blog at http://fawny.org is very deliberately minimalist.
Deceptively simple. The column width could not be more optimal for online reading. The font stack leaves me, as primarily a Windows user, with Cambria as the body font which also helps. The articles are centered, as well – no shifting around required.
Joe has said that he’s systematically tried to remove anything that would be perceived as “design”.
A good model, by my lights.

Yes I’m aware it comes across as a shameless plug, but in redesigning my own site my goal was to hew to a minimalist approach in terms of color, typography, and layout. Quite a bit of inspiration came from a few of the sites already noted above.

A not totally unrelated aside: anybody else find themselves unable to resist looking at the code behind those early minimalist sites Mr. Zeldman listed? Not so minimal. What a difference a decade of web standards promotion makes! (thanks!)

Cardigan Industries is awesome! Just looking at that page and scanning the text makes me wish it was still around.

It was a great loss to writing and design on the web when Dean Allen decided to stop blogging, move to France, and romp with dogs. (While in semi-retirement, he gave us a publishing platform, and has since relaunched Textism and created FAVRD.)

I am a pureist minimalalist web designer. I think web designers should have no shame in having their own style instead of complying to a general fashion. One day, maybe when you are dead, you will be famous for your art style, just like all the famous artists…